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I’d seen so many unusual things over the past couple of days — ancient mango groves, oases, tiny blue birds and nocturnal flying creepy-crawly juggernauts — that my mind was ticking boxes on a different checklist. Of course it wasn’t a unicorn. It was a zebu with its head turned towards me, but for the half-second before my brain caught up with my eyes I had comfortably inhabited a place where unicorns existed.
One of our party had explained to me that, although she was an atheist, she found it best to tell people here she was a Christian because the idea of being faithless was to them a kind of dereliction of duty, something they could not understand. It was all so achingly beautiful out in the sub-Saharan savannah, the Sahel, it was hard not to start considering how and why. It begged the question.
I was in Burkina Faso, which ranks 174 out of 177 on the UN’s developing nations index. It’s about as poor as a country can be but it was magical enough that a unicorn wouldn’t seem out of place. Recently it’s as if Africa is just a big place where bad news comes from, a vast disaster area. We are encouraged to engage with it out of guilt or pity and I had only prepared myself for the downside. I really wasn’t ready for the devastating beauty of the place. That’s what overwhelmed me from the moment I arrived. Sure, it’s awful as well. The chicken is too chewy. I saw a dead body lying in the road and I don’t know what could be worse than that, but never forget Africa is overall a source of more good news than bad.
I wasn’t sure what to expect in Burkina. It’s a country that doesn’t have weather in the sense that we have weather. It has a climate. It is very hot and dry for half the year, and then it is very hot and wet. The effects of climate change are already being felt out on the plain. It’s gradually getting hotter and the wet season is getting shorter. Practically everyone here is a farmer and, because they have been forced to adapt, they’re actually leading the way in sustainable farming practices.
At Zongou I saw a new reservoir that has transformed 100 acres of savannah into an idyllic market garden. Successful farms in the Western world do exude a certain grandiose majesty. There is something beautiful about the scale of intensive farms, the way that a skyscraper is beautiful, slightly austere, but nonetheless magnificent. The human scale of the succession of tiny precious gardens in Zongou was of a different order, the closest thing to paradise I’ve ever seen. That’s the thing. It’s all as close to paradise as it is to ruin. There is hope. We drove and walked through endless tiny gardens sprouting rice, bananas, aubergine, cabbages. You couldn’t imagine anything more lovely.
A 78-year-old man called Allie showed me his fertiliser beds. He’d dug these two swimming-pool-sized pits with a pickaxe and a shovel with no help from anyone. He’d filled them with a gigantic terrine of layers of animal dung, straw and vegetable waste. This produces a weapons-grade organic fertiliser. I helped him make a demi-lune, a semi-circular vegetable bed, scooping out the soil from the inside to form a ridge around the edge to help trap the rain when it arrives. We planted some peanut seeds, tiny little drops in the huge landscape with its huge weather conditions, and as we eked his compost out over those precious peanuts I heard myself saying a prayer.
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